Friday, January 29, 2016

White people have the least confidence in the American Dream(marketwatch.com).This is based on the Atlantic/Aspen Institute "American Dream" poll (2015). "While more than 80% of Asian-Americans, Latinos, and African-Americans say they are either living the Dream or believe they can, just 68% of whites say the same thing." Paradoxically (yet characteristically), while the vast majority of Americans say the American Dream is on the decline, most survey respondents think they themselves are living the Dream. Half of all Americans say they are living the Dream now and 22% believe they can achieve it in their lifetime. But the racial breakout is interesting:

White people think the American Dream is least achievable

Whites

African-Americans

Latinos/Hispanics

Asians

Currently living the American Dream

51%

43%

55%

55%

Not living the Dream, but believe they can

17%

39%

28%

27%

Not living the Dream, and don’t believe they can

32%

19%

17%

18%

Sociologists, please discuss.

The stock market is great at destroying capital and jobs (marketwatch.com). But wait, is the stock market supposed to create jobs? Well, yes, actually. The purpose of a stock market is to give corporations access to capital. Companies are then supposed to use the capital to grow the business. Ultimately that should mean more jobs, yes? That's not what's going on. Capital creates very few jobs in this economy. (Read the article.) And most public corporations are slowly taking themselves private with stock buybacks. (Apple will be private in about 20 years at the current rate.)

In
1990, the top three automakers in Detroit had among them nominal
revenues of $250 billion, a market capitalization of $36 billion, and
1.2 million employees. The top three companies in Silicon Valley in 2014
had nominal revenues of $247 billion, a market capitalization of over
$1 trillion, and only 137,000 employees.

Again: Capital is no longer coupled to job creation, except in an incidental way.

Have we, in fact, reached "peak stuff"? (newscientist.com). This meme is worth oh-so-many blogs. Because fundamentally, it's true: The market for "stuff" is finite, and those of us in the advertising-dominated adhocracies of the world reached peak ability to consume a long time ago (IMHO). Speaking for myself, we wrote about this idea enthusiastically (and prematurely) 40 years ago at The Mother Earth News (where I got my first "real job"). I do think the IKEA guy is right: Mindless consumption has peaked, in the developed economies, at least, and is now cycling down. If you live in an OECD country, chances are, you're buying less meat than ever before, less gasoline, less sugar, fewer burgers, fewer cars, oh hell . . . fewer ironing boards, fewer shirts, less dry cleaning. For crying out loud we've REACHED PEAK COAT HANGER! Steel, concrete, oil, sugar, Happy Meals, inkjet cartridges, "printer paper," aluminum foil, bath towels, ketchup, dishwashing detergent, vinegar, light bulbs, post cards, for God's sake man, is there anything we haven't reached peak consumption of? I could go on. And maybe I will, in future blogs. In the meantime? Immerse yourself in "peak stuff" articles. This meme is immensely important. And congrats for reading up on it, because no professional economist seems to "get it" yet. You're way out front!

Unequal Risk (publicintegrity.org). "Workers in America face risks from toxic exposures that would be considered unacceptable outside the job — and in many cases are perfectly legal." A remarkable series of articles. Among the stories:

What If Instagram Used The Blockchain? (cointelegraph.com).It's still all a bit fuzzy, but the virtue of this article is that it does, in fact, give some real-world case studies of businesses that are using blockchain tech in unique ways. One gets the feeling that Digital Rights Management will end up creating a useful use-case for blockchain.